Five years after waking, Kade Bher belonged to the academy in the same way a knife belonged to a drawer that had learned to make room for it.

  Not comfortably.

  Not naturally.

  But with enough daily repetition that everyone had stopped acting surprised by the fact of him.

  He was twenty-one now.

  Older in the face, though never soft in it. Taller than the boy who had woken in the infirmary, but still compact in the way that made people underestimate him right up until they saw him move. His hair remained windswept and stubborn, his eyes still the same steel blue that often looked colder than they meant to, and the rough defensive shell around him had only gotten more skillfully assembled with time.

  The academy had spent five years trying to smooth him into something properly presentable.

  It had failed in interesting ways.

  Kade had completed his classes.

  All of them.

  Command-track requirements.

  Strategic modules.

  Joint integration exams.

  Emergency operations certification.

  Field logistics.

  KANSEN command coordination.

  Fleet ethics.

  Survival leadership.

  Damage-control oversight.

  Communications discipline.

  Administrative review blocks, which he still regarded as the punishment section of civilization.

  He had passed them all.

  Passed them well, in fact, when measured by the criteria academies liked to brag about in reports and old men liked to underline in meetings. His marks were strong. His practical evaluations stronger. His tactical instincts had become the sort of thing instructors referenced in classes when they wanted to sound impressed without admitting they were slightly unnerved.

  And yet.

  Even after five years, even after the academy had turned him into a cadet others respected, relied on, copied, or occasionally avoided with healthy instinct, he was still not a clean product.

  He still climbed infrastructure if maintenance didn’t get there first.

  He still noticed every loose hinge, bad fan bearing, off-rhythm pipe rattle, and stressed support bracket within fifty feet like the island itself was whispering offenses directly into his spine.

  He still moved differently under pressure than he did at rest, and every practical instructor worth anything had eventually learned to stop trying to correct it because what came out the other side worked too well to punish honestly.

  He still slept badly often enough that Vestal could tell without asking.

  He still hid it better than almost anyone his age had a right to.

  And he was tired.

  Tired of the academy.

  Tired of the noise.

  Tired of the whistles and bells and institutional voices and the endless low-level hum of fluorescent existence. Tired of young cadets trying too hard, old instructors pretending the system was cleaner than it was, and the way the place smelled faintly of polish, salt, paper, and other people’s expectations.

  He stayed because the academy had not finished with him yet.

  Technically, he was done.

  Practically, he was waiting.

  Waiting on assignment.

  Waiting on placement.

  Waiting on the official word of where the Admiralty and academy joint review had decided to send Cadet—soon to be Commander—Kade Bher and the attached support ship who had become so thoroughly part of his life that the records stopped treating their pairing as an experiment years ago.

  The waiting irritated him.

  It made everything louder.

  So he kept busy.

  He taught small classes when ordered.

  Not the polished officer-facing ones. Not the diplomatic or doctrinal modules meant to make future commanders feel eloquent and properly centered.

  No.

  Kade taught survival.

  Close practical things.

  The ugly little lessons official manuals buried under better language.

  What to do when your map was wrong.

  How to move through a damaged structure without dying stupidly.

  How to tell if a sound in the wall was harmless or not.

  How to check exits before panic made everyone think they remembered them.

  What to carry if you only had room for three things.

  How to keep breathing when the room had already gone bad.

  The academy officially called these sessions adaptive field survivability supplements or some equally pompous nonsense.

  The students called them Bher’s classes.

  Most of the attendees were mass-produced KANSEN and KANSAI.

  That made sense.

  They were often the ones most likely to be asked to survive bad assignments with too little support and too much implied expendability. A few humans came too—usually the quieter ones, the marines, the practical-minded cadets, or those who had heard from others that Kade taught like a man who distrusted fantasy and expected his students to come back alive.

  He was good at it.

  That irritated him too.

  Because it came too naturally.

  Because while the academy wrote it down as instinct and unusual practical sensitivity, Kade knew exactly where most of those lessons had come from.

  Mizunokuni had taught him how to move through hidden country without offending it.

  Wysteria had taught him how to survive when surviving stopped being noble and became mechanical.

  This world was only benefitting from scars it had never paid for.

  He never said that.

  He never would.

  You did not sit in a military classroom and explain that your credibility came from two previous lives and a death you still remembered in your joints.

  So he let them call it instinct.

  Let them think he was naturally this way.

  That it had blossomed from pressure, talent, discipline, and perhaps a particularly vivid adolescence.

  It was easier than truth.

  That afternoon, five years in, the academy grounds were washed in light rain.

  Not storm-heavy, not miserable, just steady enough to darken the concrete and silver the rails and make the seawall beyond the main instructional blocks look like old slate. The rain gave the place a quieter mood, one Kade appreciated because it damped the crowd noise by a degree and made people walk with more purpose.

  He met Vestal near one of the outer maintenance terraces overlooking the lower practical yards.

  There was a canopy there, half shelter and half structural afterthought, with a long view over the academy’s rear service routes and, farther out, the sea beyond the training lanes. The maintenance crew had finally fixed the chronic gutter rattle there last month after Kade had made the fatal mistake of looking at it too thoughtfully during a storm.

  Now the canopy was silent.

  Which was almost disappointing.

  Vestal stood at the rail with a file in hand and her hair touched faintly by mist. At twenty-one, Kade still thought of her the way he always had—clear-eyed, compact, and carrying a kind of steady gravity that made chaos seem embarrassed of itself around her when she chose to enforce that condition.

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  She looked up when he approached.

  “You’re early.”

  “I was nearby.”

  “That sounds suspicious.”

  “It should. I came from the east support wall.”

  Vestal lowered the file slightly. “Why.”

  Kade leaned his elbows on the rail beside her and looked out at the rain.

  “Loose bracket on the upper signal conduit.”

  Her expression flattened.

  “Did maintenance know.”

  “Yes.”

  “And.”

  “And I got there before they did.”

  Vestal closed her eyes briefly.

  “Kade.”

  “I fixed it.”

  “That was not the disputed part.”

  He looked at her sidelong.

  “You make it sound like I climbed the tower with a knife in my teeth.”

  Vestal stared at him.

  There was a long pause.

  Then she said, “Did you.”

  “No.”

  Another pause.

  “…This time.”

  That got a short, hopeless exhale out of her that hovered somewhere between a sigh and a laugh gone astray.

  “Maintenance has a betting pool about you.”

  He turned fully toward her.

  “They what.”

  “Nothing malicious. Mostly timing estimates.” She looked back at the file. “You’re listed as a variable now.”

  “That is obscene.”

  “That is accurate.”

  He muttered something unflattering about institutions and their inability to appreciate initiative.

  Vestal let him.

  Below them, a group of mass-produced KANSEN cadets were finishing one of his survival supplement sessions. He could tell by the movement patterns alone—less rigid than formal drill, more practical clustering, gear checked in pairs, exit awareness tested by repetition instead of shouted doctrine. A few humans were there too, soaked at the shoulders and serious in the way students got when they’d realized a class might actually save them later.

  One of the younger KANSAI boys pointed toward the service catwalk overhead and said something that made the others laugh.

  Vestal followed Kade’s gaze.

  “They like your classes.”

  “That’s unfortunate.”

  “It means you’re useful.”

  “That’s also unfortunate.”

  Vestal’s mouth twitched.

  “You’ve gotten very good at pretending not to care.”

  Kade stared out at the wet academy grounds for a while before answering.

  “Who says I’m pretending.”

  She turned to look at him properly then.

  Five years had taught her many things about him.

  What a lie sounded like in his voice.

  How tired changed the angle of his shoulders.

  That his sarcasm sharpened when he was worried and flattened when he was hurt.

  That silence, with him, was rarely emptiness and more often pressure contained.

  She knew enough now not to answer too quickly.

  After a moment she said, “Fair.”

  He let that sit between them.

  The rain tapped on the canopy overhead. Somewhere farther down the service route, maintenance rolled a ladder cart over damp concrete. In the lower yard, the cadets broke apart by twos and threes, some heading toward chow, others toward afternoon review, a few lingering to ask one another stupid questions in the damp the way young people always would.

  Kade watched them and felt, not for the first time, the strange distance that came from being inside a life and still not entirely of it.

  Five years.

  He had managed five years.

  Five years of classes and drills and sleeping wrong and hiding it.

  Five years of pretending his instincts belonged to youth.

  Five years of knowing, with the tired certainty of experience, that the real world outside the academy walls was waiting.

  And now that it was close—now that assignment orders were somewhere in the machinery chewing toward him—he felt less eager than he should have.

  Not afraid.

  Just done.

  Done with hall bells.

  Done with evaluation sheets.

  Done with living inside a place that trained command while still smelling like polished adolescence.

  He spoke before he had fully decided to.

  “When do you think they’ll send me?”

  Vestal looked down at the file.

  Her eyes scanned something there she had probably already read twice.

  “Soon.”

  “That sounds deliberately vague.”

  “That’s because no one tells me anything until they’re sure I’ll disapprove in a medically relevant way.” She tapped the file. “But the review language is final-stage. You’re done, Kade.”

  He looked at the rain-dark horizon.

  The words should have felt cleaner.

  Done.

  Finished.

  Ready.

  Instead they sat oddly.

  Vestal watched him absorb that.

  “You don’t sound thrilled.”

  “I’m tired.”

  “That is not new.”

  “No,” he said. “It isn’t.”

  He pushed off the rail, paced one step, then returned to it in the same motion. Restlessness wore different clothes on him now than it had at sixteen, but it was still recognizable if one knew where to look.

  “I’m tired of the noise,” he said after a while.

  Vestal said nothing.

  Kade went on, quieter.

  “The bells. The corridors. The endless… institutional throat-clearing.” His mouth flattened. “Every wall in this place sounds like it wants something.”

  That got her.

  Because it was ridiculous.

  Because it was true.

  “The academy has always made too much noise for you,” she said.

  He gave her a sidelong look. “For me?”

  “For anyone with functioning ears and standards.”

  “Good recovery.”

  “I work hard at them.”

  He almost smiled.

  Almost.

  Then the expression faded again, replaced by something more thoughtful and less guarded than he usually allowed in daylight.

  He looked out over the service routes, the lower yard, the sea beyond, and spoke in a tone Vestal heard only rarely—the one he used when a sentence actually mattered and he had not yet decided how to hide that.

  “When I get sent out,” he said, “will you come with me?”

  Vestal stilled.

  Not dramatically.

  She just… stopped moving in the small ways people usually did without noticing. The file in her hand lowered by half an inch. The rain seemed louder against the canopy for a second, though that may have only been because the moment had sharpened.

  Kade did not look at her right away.

  That made it worse.

  Or perhaps gentler.

  More honest, anyway.

  He kept his eyes on the training sea as he continued, voice dry enough that someone who didn’t know him well might have mistaken it for casual.

  “You’re the only friend I’ve got here.”

  There it was.

  No jokes.

  No deflection.

  No convenient sarcasm to put a shield over the line before it landed.

  Vestal looked at him fully now.

  Five years of him.

  Five years of early mornings, tea, practical drills, bad sleep, vent incidents, sea exercises, med reviews, arguments, silence, and a hundred tiny unspoken choices that had somehow become a life.

  She had known, on some level.

  That she mattered.

  That he trusted her in the rare strange ways he trusted anyone.

  That she had become, for him, something more stable than the academy itself.

  But hearing it aloud still did something to her.

  “You could have led with that,” she said softly.

  Kade finally looked over.

  “And risk sounding sincere?”

  “Yes.”

  “That seems reckless.”

  “It does,” Vestal agreed. Then, because she was kinder than the world had any right to be, she let him have one heartbeat of relief before adding, “But for the record, yes.”

  He blinked.

  “Yes?”

  “Yes, Kade.”

  Something in his face shifted.

  Not dramatic relief.

  Not even visible happiness in a form most people would catch.

  Just tension releasing from one old private place.

  “If they assign me with you, I go.”

  The answer was simple.

  He should have expected that.

  He had hoped for it so hard anyway that hearing it aloud still hit with the strange disorienting force of grace.

  “You don’t even know where I’m going.”

  “No,” she said. “But I know you.”

  That shut him up for a second.

  Which, in Vestal’s opinion, was one of the best outcomes a conversation could achieve.

  Below the terrace, one of the maintenance workers shouted up toward the signal line tower and someone else answered from a ladder platform. The practical yard whistle blew once. A flock of seabirds wheeled low and gray over the water before vanishing into the mist.

  Kade looked back toward the sea.

  “Could be somewhere ugly.”

  Vestal moved to stand beside him again at the rail.

  “Most places worth sending you probably will be.”

  “That’s a very poor endorsement of my future.”

  “That’s a realistic one.”

  He huffed a short breath through his nose.

  There was an ease to the silence after that.

  Not empty.

  Never empty with them.

  Just settled.

  The kind that comes after truth has been said and accepted and no one feels the need to crowd it with relief.

  Eventually Vestal lifted the file again and glanced through the first page.

  “You know,” she said, “they’ve been talking about your field classes.”

  Kade made a face immediately. “That sounds ominous.”

  “It means some instructors are beginning to think your practical survival supplements should become part of the regular support curriculum.”

  “That sounds worse.”

  “Because?”

  “Because if they formalize it, then they’ll make me write it down in approved language.”

  Vestal looked mildly sympathetic.

  “Oh no. Not approved language.”

  He looked at her flatly. “I would rather fight the conduit tower again.”

  “That is because you are deeply unwell in very specific directions.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  She flipped another page.

  “There’s also a note here that the command board found your latest exercise reviews unusually strong in asymmetrical fleet handling.”

  “That sounds like a very clean way to say I make ugly plans.”

  “That is because they are trying to sound professional.”

  He leaned slightly closer to the file.

  “What else.”

  Vestal scanned lower.

  “‘Demonstrates persistent aptitude for maximizing support and auxiliary platforms beyond expected doctrinal use.’”

  Kade’s expression went dry.

  “They mean Vestal.”

  “They mean you used me to bully a battleship.”

  “That was academically valuable.”

  “That was rude.”

  “That was also academically valuable.”

  This time he did smile, if only by a fraction.

  Vestal noticed.

  Tucked it away where she tucked all the small things he gave without meaning to.

  The file rustled in her hand as she reached the assignment review page again.

  Whatever was written there, she didn’t read it aloud yet.

  Maybe because she knew the waiting would be over soon enough.

  Maybe because this moment, under rain and steel and the old academy’s tired concrete, still belonged to the last shape of the life they had known.

  Cadet and attached support unit.

  Not yet Commander and whatever came after.

  She closed the file.

  “Kade.”

  He looked at her.

  “You know maintenance really has gotten faster because of you.”

  “That is not a compliment.”

  “I think it is.”

  “No, it means they’ve evolved defensive behavior.”

  Vestal laughed softly.

  “Maybe.”

  He glanced down toward the lower service road where a junior maintenance crew was replacing a damaged outer grate before he could apparently even start glaring at it.

  For a moment his expression became something close to genuine offense.

  “They didn’t even give me a chance.”

  “That,” Vestal said, “is called institutional learning.”

  “It’s rude.”

  “It’s efficient.”

  “It’s rude.”

  She let him have that.

  A gust of misting rain swept under the canopy. Cold, light, brief. It touched his sleeve and her cheek and the rail between them.

  Kade looked out at the academy one more time.

  The blocks.

  The yards.

  The towers.

  The sea-lane markers.

  The places he had learned to survive again without ever explaining what again meant.

  Then he said, quieter than before, “I don’t think I’m going to miss this place.”

  Vestal stood with him in that.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t think you are either.”

  He let out a breath.

  Not relief.

  Not dread.

  Just the sound a person makes when the next chapter has already begun moving toward him, whether he’s ready or not.

  And beside him, under the rain and the old academy’s constant noise, the only friend he had made in this world stood steady and said, by presence alone as much as words:

  wherever you go, you will not go alone.